Essay: Richard Dawkins' comment concerning Adolf Hitler

Richard Dawkins said in an interview, "What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question..."[1]

Richard Dawkins said in an interview, "What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question..."[1]

The interviewer wrote, regarding the Hitler comment, "I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own philosophical position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point."[1]

About 12 million perished during the Holocaust due to brutal Nazi policies and Richard Dawkins finds it difficult question on whether Hitler was wrong or right in what he did?[2] The torture, mistreatment, disease breeding conditions, gruesome experiments on human beings, and overwork were horrendous in concentration camps.[3][4][5]

Evolutionary racism of Adolph Hitler and Charles Darwin

If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such cases all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.[6]

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Charles Darwin himself was a racist and white supremacist. He predicted mass genocide claiming:

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At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.[7]

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Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele (1911 - 1979) was a Germanphysician and researcher who perpetrated the Holocaust in the Auschwitz death camp. Mengele had obtained a Ph.D. based on the study of racial differences in the anatomy of the jaw. He was one of the greatest supporters of Nazi theories of racial superiority with questionable research claims. Dr. Josef Mengele's evolutionary thinking was in accordance with social Darwinist theories that Adolph Hitler and a number of German academics found appealing.[8] Mengele studied under the leading proponents the "unworthy life" branch of evolutionary thought.[9] Mengele strongly supported the murder of the physically and mentally disabled. Dr. Mengele was one of the most notorious individuals associated with Nazi death camps and the Holocaust.[10] Dr. Mengele obtained a infamous reputation due to his experiments on twins while at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[11] He was known as the "Angel of Death."

He performed experiments on humans in the concentration camps attempting to prove that disease was the product of racial inferiority and in order to genetically engineer a new species, which was the aim of his organization, the Frankfurt based Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. He amputated healthy limbs and performed other unusual operations on prisoners.

A note of thanks for the Conservapedians who composed the Joseph Mengele material